Clock signals are used for timing or synchronizing operations within many electronic devices. Various applications may employ clock signals that are multiphase clock signals, also referred to interchangeably herein as multiphase signals. A multiphase signal is defined as a set of sinusoidal or rectangular signals with individual signal components having equally spaced phase differences and a monotonic increase of phase when going from one signal to a next one.
Multiphase signals may be used, for example, for timing or synchronizing read and write operations for memories, such as double-data-rate (DDR) memories, for timing or synchronizing data transfer operations to perform a Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes) function, or for any other suitable application. Multiphase signals are often generated by multi-tap ring oscillators and may need to be divided down to produce desired frequencies for a particular application.